Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

Do you live on the moon?

Earlier this year I installed a 7.8kW system in Canada for $13k CAD all in, inc the inverter and labor. (Then I got a $5k subsidy to bring it to $8k out of pocket.)

It’s cheaper now, panel prices fall every month.

Fair call for lithium chemistries, which will probably drop closer to one order of magnitude within 2-3 years (if the trend from the last year-to-date holds). But if we're talking about sodium ion, I wouldn't be surprised if that did drop by a couple of orders of magnitude, which is already sitting about ~140USD/kwh for consumer packs (but before shipping from China). It has a weird discharge voltage curve and needs a more capable inverter to handle it though, but at the prices I'm seeing, overcapacity is plenty affordable.

Or if you're looking now at sodium ion. It's only just hitting the consumer market, but it's already cheap enough for energy storage at the scale GP is talking about. Might take a few years for cell quality, inverter, and charging technology to improve, but by 2030 it will be so dirt cheap to the point that it would be economically sensible for any household.

My personal experience, as someone who has lived in, and worked from, rural areas with limited bandwidth, is that latency (for SSH connections) is the only thing that matters for learning and productivity.

But OP clearly knows better, because if we just gave everyone gigabit fiber, the access to UHD Pornhub, Netflix, Amazon Video, etc, will instantly correct the "digital divide". And OP has a point. I know someone who started designing > 500k qubit quantum computers with > 5s coherence after spending two weeks straight watching all seasons of My 600Lb Life.

He kept mumbling something about "It's not in the box, it's in the band"

There's very good reasons starlink has such low limits on terminals per cell.

So they don't need to have equivalent transit capacity.

Which is not a capability Starlink can provide.

There is a lot of infrastructure where the cost to replace is an order of magnitude higher than the inflation adjusted original cost.

As of September 2024 they have 6,371 operational satellites and ~ 4 million customers globally.

It’s always worth remembering that efficiency and technical limitations are different things. We could absolutely blanket the US in 5G towers but the cost is vastly higher than the benefit.

I was satisfied with the other person's response.

We basically punted on the 10th amendment with things like the FCC and DOE (education, not energy).

Areas in need of humanitarian aid provided by airships is a too-small niche to (re-)develop entirely new flight technology.

Geeks like blimps, and they need a story, that is all that is.

Also it's not as if this is the -only- money spent on these endeavors. This is one agency in one year, doing something which was unprecedented until they could manage it via Covid 'emergency' measures.

You can stick your fingers in your ears if you want, but people are going to be pissed and have every right to be -- just like you have the right to handwave it away if you so choose.

I just said ICE off the cuff, but it could just as easily have been Border Patrol or some other agency. At the end of the day, I doubt if you asked many people "Do you want your countries emergency management fund setup so they blow their budget flying in people from other countries and putting them in hotels that you can no longer utilize, more cash benefits than disaster victims that grew up paying taxes here - or would you prefer that money be spent on national emergencies?"

I think you would have a hard time finding people who say "oh please, spend that on hotels and shelters and migrant flights! Their wants come before my family and friends needs."

And before you give me some spiel about how that's a 'false dichotomy', I'll remind you that FEMA is currently saying they can't afford another storm and are being raked through the coals in how badly they are handling the current one. So it is not a hypothetical situation - they literally said that American citizens are going to have to donate their personal already-been-taxed money to make it through this.

That's 640 million that could have not been taken on TOP of the taxes from Americans, because of course people are going to pony up to save their communities.

On top of taking at least 1/4-1/3 of every paycheck, they are TELLING us that we have to fund our own rescue.

Honest question - what number IS worth quibbling about in your mind? What dollar value legitimizes scrutinizing government spending? I didn't know there was a threshold we had to meet for the concerns to be valid. By that logic if an agencies budget grows large enough, there is simply no valid criticism that can be leveled, and the budget must always go up just like the stocks!

I haven't even heard of a single account of someone successfully getting the $750 'immediate need' funded, but I have seen dozens of videos of people crying or angry that they got denied immediately without any reason. Admittedly that's selection bias, but I actively looked for people who did.

I also have yet to see a single person who things this is being handled well... and I see a lot of active duty service/reserve members very angry they can't help their friends and family while they are standby to go die for another middle east war we have no business in.

Things I learned from this thread: 1) Elon Musk bad, despite using what resources he has to help -- any help is an automatic bait and switch to monopolize the internet (lol) 2) Government spending criticism irrelevant, you have to meet a hazy threshold for the concern to be worth 'quibbling about' 3) HN Users are largely in a very bubbled social circle (online and off), and are going to be shocked when reality penetrates that bubble.

It is extremely likely that your marginal costs for that month are only internet transit/egress to the tune of less than $0.05 per GB, and you soft cap their access such that maybe 100 GB is their practical limit for the month, you just sold a $300 device that sales were slowing on for worst-case $295, with a likely future revenue stream.

I mostly wanted to correct that to say at worse it is a non gesture. Somewhat helping a couple hundred people out of a million plus, is not quite the "nice" gesture. Particularly a relatively poor population. IDK, a pedantic debate of "nice and meaningful" vs "nice but not significant" is not interesting. Non-gesture I would equate to the latter. It is not like 10k of these devices were rushed in, fully activated, on the second day when it would have counted most.

The help here is now coming late. 5 days ago (Monday) and this would have been much more helpful. To boot, just "first month free"

Which is my same response when you say someone, yeah that is some people. Not many, does not really move the needle as much as it could. Though, for those where this first month free was helpful - that is great. Except overall, "first month free" is not really a gamechanger for the significant population on the ground. Find specific evidence otherwise if you want to make that claim. I'll be in the area in a week or two, I'll ask about this.

> This is concern trolling at best

Concern trolling vs savior complex.. The quality of this dialogue is now severely degraded after this insult.

My family is in western NC not far outside of Asheville. Town of 100k. For _all_ of them, this "gesture" is meaningless since both factors of cell phone coverage and money are at play. Cell phone coverage (for SMS) came back online last sunday, and they reported to me a lot of people are badly off because the end of month paycheck was not soon enough and those people could not buy supplies in preparation.

I do not know where you are located. I have the impression this forum is dominated by people that don't understand how poor rural parts of the country can be. Appalachia is one of the very poor parts of the country. Poverty rates in western NC are typically 15 to 20% [1]. Per capita income in appalachia is roughly $40k [2] (consider the implications for the distribution). About 1.2M people [3] in western NC, with 200k of them unable to even buy food. As far as pre-existing deployments, $300 for a starlink and $120/month is way out of the question.

I don't see the numbers working out where a "first month is free", even with the device being donated as all that terribly useful en masse here.

Though, in fairness, I do see utility to have a starlink on the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of supplies heading into a small, cut-off, town of 100 and then coordinating further relief effort. At the same time, supplies and evac are more priority. Which is to say, the use case where I think this shines is for emergency workers. Again, first month free is meaningless there.

Worst case, yeah - essentially a non-gesture (worst case)

[1] https://www.arc.gov/map/poverty-rates-in-appalachia-2013-201...

[2] https://www.arc.gov/map/per-capita-income-rates-in-appalachi...

https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/starlink-internet-review/

They didn’t do anything but offer the same deal they would to anyone else.

Do you have evidence that any starlink receivers were delivered via pack mule?

It would be cool if so, if not - potentially urban legend akin to "spitting on vietnam veterans" (I've read there are zero documented cases of that ever happening)

I mean, we know pack mules have been in use, and we know starlink receivers have been delivered. I don't know though that any receivers were on pack mules (it cannot be assumed).

Before that, a more direct response to my question would have been appreciated too.

I finally see you are responding mostly to: "Those in the cut off areas (via land transit) can't get the equipment anyways, and to boot any cost is a complete barrier."

By that I was mostly thinking of people going out and getting the units themselves. That scales well. I see the statement was not super clear though as to why I was saying that.

The claim in contention is whether the starlink units are more than marginal. I was not willing to accept that claim, and I added the claim that had they been widely deployed in the immediate first two days following - the utility would have been super significant. Stores going from cash only to allowing credit cards is huge. Now that we are almost a week later, the "conventional" systems are coming back online.

Comms before the storm would either have been via cell tower, landline, sat phone, satellite plus generator, or ISP (perhaps other?). The more remote, the more likely there will be satellite (from my observations, I suspect that would be true provided that the remote area is not that impoverished; which they might be). Which does leave a niche that would still benefit from starlink. Early on, most of conventional comm systems were down. That niche would have been even larger. A week later, a lot of "conventional" comms are back. Yet, there is still a niche of utility (even at this time) for starlinks.

Per FEMA, they deployed 40 starlink units to NC [1]. That is potentially 1000 to 4000 people benefitting. Cajun navy efforts might have deployed more. I'm guessing the small towns that most benefit are order 50 to 100 people. If there is another 60 units deployed via cajun navy, we might be talking 10k people. Of 1M in western NC, that is getting significant and certainly very helpful for those people. With those wild ass guesses, I would concede that the utility is likely more than just marginal (which is me changing my mind here and starting to accept the claim of more than marginal utility).

I will point out as an observation, even earlier deployments would have been even more useful. Specifically my family in western NC would have benefited. They had SMS only comms the next day of the storm. The "cash only" for a week was one of their major challenges.

I think for grocery stores, them having conventional satelite is a good backup since that is more cost effective. Though, there is still a place for starlinks since they are highly portable. Particularly for getting payment systems back online, and emergency comms for places without cell coverage (that don't already have someone with conventional satellite plus generator or solar)

[1] https://www.fema.gov/press-release/20241003/biden-harris-adm...